Graduate Life

7 SKILLS YOU NEED TO MASTER BEFORE GOING TO GRADUATE SCHOOL

Are you ready for graduate school? Though your past academic performance is what gets you into grad school, your personal habits and attitudes are what will get you through. Only half of doctoral students end up completing their degrees within 10 years, and whether you'll be one of them will be determined less by your academic talent and more by your ability to stay disciplined, healthy, and cool-headed in the stressful atmosphere of graduate school. To give yourself the best chance of getting through grad school, make it a priority to master these seven skills before you go.

Time management Your ability to manage your time is the single biggest factor in how well you will do in grad school and how stressful your experience will be. The workload in grad school is intense, and if you don't take care of your assignments promptly, you'll find yourself feeling constantly behind and miserable. To manage your time effectively, you'll need to organize both your short-term assignments and your long-term projects such as a thesis or dissertation. You may also have to account for the additional responsibility of teaching and grading papers on top of doing your own work. Diligence and planning are essential to staying on top of your game. Studying effectively It might be hard to believe that you can make it all the way to graduate school without knowing how to study effectively, but it happens. In college, you may have been used to cramming for exams and then forgetting the information soon afterwards. Your grades reflected how well you absorbed the knowledge from your textbooks and lectures, but not how well you could put that information to use. Learning in graduate school is completely different. To do well in graduate school, you need to be able

to keep track of an enormous amount of reading and research, synthesize the knowledge you glean from numerous sources, and produce intelligent commentary on it, mostly on an independent basis. It's also important to be disciplined enough to study every day. Making regular progress will keep your knowledge fresh and your morale up, but if you let days or weeks slide by without doing much work, you'll lose your edge and possibly spend unnecessary extra years in school. Stress management Graduate school is a stressful place. It's no coincidence that grad students are frequently plagued with high levels of anxiety, depression, and other mental problems. The competitive atmosphere of graduate school, the deadlines, the burdens of teaching, and the frequent criticism—not always constructive— from your mentors and your peers can strain you to your limits even if you're a calm, grounded person. Unless you know how to manage your stress and stay cool-headed in a high-pressure environment, you'll probably be unhappy in graduate school. Good time management, as mentioned above, can help keep your stress levels to a minimum. It's also important to guard your time and turn off your work mind sometimes. Many grad students fall into the trap of making their work their sole priority all the time, and that's not healthy for anyone. Cultivate a side hobby that gives you a mental break from your work, stay in touch with your friends, and spend time with people outside academia. Working hard is important but overburdening yourself is counterproductive. Networking Part of your future success—or lack thereof—in the world of academia is your ability to network. This holds true even if you're an introvert, have social anxiety, or just aren't a people person.

Though your past academic performance is what gets you into grad school, your personal habits and attitudes are what will get you through.

Networking is a necessary part of the job, and successful academics learn to do it, even if they find it difficult or don't particularly like it. Get to know people outside your department and try to connect with people from different schools. Go to conferences and talk to scholars you find interesting. Keep in touch with past contacts from college. Unfortunately, the academic world is not entirely merit-based, and being a good scholar is not the only requirement for being successful. Sometimes it really is about who you know. Coping with failure You're going to fail at some point in graduate school. Maybe your paper gets rejected, your advisor tears your thesis-in-progress to shreds, or you realize you've wasted three months on a dissertation topic that's going nowhere. No one goes into graduate school expecting or wanting these things to happen, but they happen anyways. Whether you make it through grad school will be in large part determined by how well you bounce back from failure. Does it crush you and send you into a funk for weeks, or do you pick yourself up and start over? To recover from inevitable failures in grad school, you'll need determination (also known as stubbornness) as well as a good support network. Don't discount the importance of having family and friends to fall back on when you're down. Staying healthy Your health makes a big difference in your overall well-being and productivity. Make it a priority to stay as healthy as you can in graduate school. Your time management skills will help you here. Eating whole, nutritious foods, exercising regularly, and getting enough sleep will give you the energy you need to get through your days, keep your immune system strong, and lift your mood. Staying healthy takes extra effort as a busy grad student, but it will keep you functioning well in all areas of your life. Budgeting Most graduate stipends are modest at best. Become a pro at budgeting before you go to grad school, so you won't find yourself in an unexpected financial pinch. Learn to shop for healthy groceries on a shoestring, get used to making do with what you have, and make a habit of setting aside savings regularly. Reduce your living expenses wherever you can, too. Having a modest standard of living will help you stretch your stipend as far as possible. Getting through grad school requires more than intellectual ability—it also takes a great deal of tenacity, diligence, and other life skills. Many talented students drop out because they are overwhelmed by stress and pressure. By mastering these seven skills before you send in your applications, you'll give yourself a good chance of finishing graduate school successfully. HE